Questions & Answers

Adding negative time in the timeline

+24 votes
1,512 views
asked Jun 30, 2017 in Studio One Feature Requests by justinmeyer (2,990 points)
Hi,

Some songs don't really start at 0001.01.01.00 but earlier.

For example Justin Timberlake - Signs

(Or any other song which starts with a prelude/pickup or an effect).

In such a case, the real start of the song in S1 won't be 0001.01.01.00 but later, which can be confusing.

So it would be good if users can decide the first measure in the timeline of the current song (or even in general).

Funnily, in the song settings you can actually choose a start of -0003.01.01.00, but it's still 0001 after closing the window...

P.S. Users could use the first negative measures for track notes - so I see two advantages in adding this feature.

Cheers!

6 Answers

+7 votes
answered Jun 30, 2017 by Skip Jones (166,690 points)
selected May 22, 2018 by AlexTinsley
 
Best answer

Thank you for the feature request. 

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0 votes
answered Jul 3, 2018 by mikemckew (400 points)
This is actually something that I'm seriously missing from Pro Tools. I like to be able to use bars as reference points, but I'm so used to having two bars of "space" before the music starts. Having negative bars allows everything to line up nicely.
+1 vote
answered Jul 6, 2018 by robertgray3 (42,610 points)
mikemckew- I think this was added in 4.0. You can add an offset that gives you a negative song start in the song settings.
0 votes
answered Jul 18, 2020 by carlharvey (430 points)
Not having this feature is killing me at this very moment! I've grown accustomed to having this in logic.  I start most of my own songs at bar 5 in Studio One, but when I am working on someone else's project it becomes a real pain to move everything.
0 votes
answered Jul 19, 2020 by benreaves (11,300 points)

The current implementation of this is that you can assign an offset to the ruler as-is, but not add bars/time before bar 1.01.01.00. Useful when you're setting up a session with lead time or a pickup bar, but if a session already exists and begins at bar 1, there's no other way to create time before that than making sure automation and layers follow every event, selecting everything on every track, and moving the entire thing, which happens SEPARATE from markers, time signatures, and tempo changes. A major problem with no solution but to move all of those things manually.

0 votes
answered Nov 29, 2020 by lorrismusic (1,510 points)
Yes, it would be so nice to have this so we can add intro to our songs without being out of the time grid
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